A general policy based placement and migration of data across tiers can be an efficient way to store data. General migration of data, however, may not include an efficient use of storage if append and/or delete operations are not performed in an efficient manner.
Current multi-tier architecture comprises policies associated with data placed on a solid state drive (SSD) tier. When a typical application accesses a file (or portion of the file), the application expects a same access latency value across the tier in association with a stable performance scenario. During a typical append or add block operation, blocks may be placed on an inefficient tier based on differing access counts across new blocks thereby resulting in overall performance degradation and unexpected consequences in user program behavior. Likewise, deleted blocks may result in underutilization of SSD space.
In one example, mechanisms may enable a process for moving data in a hybrid aggregate associated with relocating data between tiers of storage media in a hybrid storage aggregate encompassing multiple tiers of heterogeneous physical storage media including a file system to automatically relocate the data between tiers. This example recites traditional data movement across SSD and HDD tiers based on set of standard policies. However, the example does not mention a file append and/or delete block mechanism. Therefore, an enabled application may degradation while accessing newly appended blocks. Likewise, deleted blocks will unnecessarily occupy SSD and HDD tiers.
In another example, data movement between an SSD and HDD comprises a relatively static process. The static process art does not consider whether data blocks belong to a single file or a movement file associated with deleted blocks of an HDD tier. Additionally, newly appended file blocks are not considered for the SSD tier.
One problem created by current multi-tier architecture includes the lack of file operation level awareness and the consideration of a file append/delete operation in order to place new data blocks on a hot tier or to remove deleted data blocks from hot tier. Additionally, the current multi-tier architecture does not allow for the placement of new data blocks by considering a set of existing data blocks comprising similar access behavior.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome at least some of the deficiencies and limitations described herein above.